If professionals seem to be at the edge of the PGA Championship, they are

Charlotte, North Carolina – The exclamation marks of these choices are revealed in good times and bad times. Scottie Scheffler, after returning here on Thursday, provides a monologue from the depths in his experience. . . Mud ball.

Shane Lowry kicked off someone else’s court on Friday: “F-This Place.” The place is the Quail Hollow Club, hosting the 103rd PGA Championship, with a $3.4 million payday awaiting the winner.

Elite men’s professional golf never costs that much money, and everyone seems to have an advantage over it before.

Collin Morikawa, after his fourth round of the fourth round, especially no one: “Sad f-golf.”

Rory McIlroy walked up to morning serve time on the player’s bridge, heard the whistle of a stop whistle and provided these transparent words to his inner life: “F— leave. ”

Scottie Scheffler gave him a bigger lead after Saturday’s 18 birdie putts: “F-Yes, baby.”

I like it. It shows their height, the fierce tournament of golf, what they control freaks.

Scheffler’s island performed well on Thursday. I don’t agree with either, but I respect what he really said: You don’t know how difficult this is! Giving special notes for his use of the word Life:

“I know how golf purists would be, ‘Oh, the lie to play it.’ But I don’t think they understand how to hit a golf ball and control it, hit and control distance and suddenly, because of rules, what it feels like [all] This was taken away from us by accident. ”

A few years ago, it strangely reminded me of Augusta’s Tiger Forest moment. During the delay in rain, he went to the range of the small member and played the ball. A member came in and told Woods that he needed to prepare for the race within six minutes. The woods gave that poor guy absolutely wilted. It seems that he doesn’t know if he has a chance. Welcome to write your own thought balloon. I might suggest at least one of these bombs, but that’s just a suggestion.

Player despise Being told what to do.

And we were there, doing that, telling them what to do. Members who host the course. Writers and broadcasters. Caddy and swing coach. Competition officials. Rules official. PGA Tour suit. Any of them can open an even number on the impossible course, and one of the oldest and most prestigious trophys in golf is waiting for you and an engraver in a cozy conference hall, and despite the heat of the day, the gas fireplace is still going?

The weirdest weekend player was Rory McIlroy, a two-time PGA champion who became the sixth player to win a career Grand Slam last month when he won the Masters in a one-hole playoffs. The relationship there was once broken by the 18-hole playoffs, but the people who participated in the game changed their minds about the matter over the years. This is their game.

Weeks after the victory, McIlroy chatted with Jimmy Fallon Show tonightwearing his new club coat. (The club allows the current winner to wear it off campus.) This is a fascinating interview. McIlroy said: “Everyone came to me and they were like, ‘Oh, you don’t know what you made us go through that Sunday. I thought, ‘How do you look at it I Do you feel it? ‘”

He conveyed the intensity of everything very well. No one can understand what it means to be a tournament golfer, except for other game golfers. Mickey Wright told me a few years ago that she only talked about tournament golf with the women she was on the LPGA tour because they were the only ones who knew.

Last Friday, news broke out about the semester’s golf standards – McIlroy is playing with the new driver instead of the driver he used in Augusta because it failed the regular tournament pretest to get compliance standards. Maybe the report is inaccurate. (It seems unlikely.) This is no exception. (For the same reason, Scottie Scheffler had to race with the new driver this week.) But McIlroy didn’t stop talking to reporters on Friday or Saturday or Sunday to provide any kind of explanation. Why? I don’t know, but I’ll guess:

Because you are not my boss! I am my boss!

It seems to me that he is turning Morshill into a mountain. But, you know: his driver issuing, his choice.

Golf for me – it’s definitely Rory McIlroy; Shane Lowry; Scottie Scheffler and his Sunday playmate Alex Noren; Collin Morikawa; Tiger Woods; and thousands of us represent freedom at every level of the game. But there is no infinite freedom, no consequences. You have to do what you want to do. One thing. McIlroy didn’t cross the line. Neither Lowry, Morikawa or Scheffler, no matter how you think about what they do and what they say.

The corridors of the golf course, from the first T-shirt to the bottom of 18 holes, call on millions of us. Quail Hollow’s golf is a kind of freedom of strong winds. Rules Book creates free boundaries, harmed by water and dangerously rough, social contracts by companion etiquette.

“It’s very nervous there,” Noren told me Sunday night. “Scotty was intense. I was intense. The course was difficult. It was the Sunday of the last group of Majors. It was very intense.” Noren tried his best to do his own thing as much as possible. He fired 76 and tied for 17th.

Schaffler was asked to describe the intensity of championship golf on Sunday night.

“It’s really hard to describe,” he said. “I think you’re on stage until you step in it and everything is online.”

In all these cases, in all these F-bombs, in various examples of these players blowing up journalists, that’s what we’ve seen, and they have very little life in the arena.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments via michael.bamberger@golf.com.